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COMMENTARY
TIME
March 25, 2013
Saddam Would Have Survived the Arab Spring
TTie fall of other dictators lets Iraqis imagine an
alternative to the 2003 invasion. But it's only a fantasy
RAQ HAS NOT YET EMBRACED THE
modern cult of the opinion poll. Voter
research is unheard of, market re¬
search is rare, and surveys of national
attitudes tend to be unscientific and
unreliable. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa
Party operatives can't tell you his favorability rat¬
ing among i8-to-30-year-olds in Diyala province,
consumer-product companies don't know what
percentage of Baghdad households own a washing
machine, and newspapers can only guess whether
drivers in Mosul are more or less dissatisfied with
the state of their roads than those in Najaf. And so,
although we know for certain that the majority of
Americans think the 2003 invasion of Iraq 10 years
ago this month was a tragic mistake, there's no reli¬
able way of telling what proportion of Iraqis feel
the same way.
IN THE FIVE YEARS THAT BAGHDAD WAS MY HOME,
from 2003 to 2007, my informal polling of Iraqis
turned up little interest in the rights or wrongs of
the invasion itself: there was a general, if grudging,
consensus that it was the only way they were going
to be rid ofSaddam Hussein. Instead, counterfactual
speculation has tended to focus on what happened
after the dictator was removed. Would the insur¬
gency have been snuffed out quickly ifWashington
had not disbanded the Iraqi military in the spring of
2003? What if political power had not been handed
over, a year later, to groups of former exiles plainly
out oftouch with the lives ofmost Iraqis? Would the
sectarian wars between Shi'ites and Sunnis have
been avoided ifthere had been better security at the
golden-domed Askariya shrine of Samarra, which
was blown up by terrorists in February 2006?
But events ofthe past two years have encouraged
Iraqis to ponder a tantalizing hypothetical: Could
their dictator have been toppled by the Arab Spring?
Shortly after Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali
and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak were removed from
office by popular uprisings, I wrote a column on
TiME.com arguing that Saddam would not have
been forced out by peaceful protests. Iraqi youth
activists, had such a species even existed, would
have struggled to organize Tahrir Square-type
mass demonstrations because they would have
lacked the tools of their Tunisian and Egyptian
peers: Saddam forbade satellite dishes, and econom¬
ic sanctions in place since his troops were kicked
IRAQ: 10
YEARS LATER
Bobby Ghosh
SERVICE
1.5
MILLION
Number of U.S.
troops who served in
Iraq in the period
from 2003 to 2011.
Nearly 1 million were
deployed more than
once, in both Iraq and
Afghanistan
CASUALTIES
4,422
Number of Americans
who were killed during
Operation Iraqi
Freedom. In addition,
318 from other
coalition countries
were killed
out of Kuwait in 1991 meant Iraqis could haver
neither personal computers nor cell phones. That
meant no Facebook, no Twitter, not even text mes>
sages. And no al-Jazeera to spread the word ffora
Baghdad to other cities.
Unlike Ben Ali and Mubarak, Saddam would
have had no compunction ordering a general
slaughter of revolutionaries; and unlike the Tirni-
sian and Egyptian military brass, the Iraqi generals
would swiftly have complied. They had alteady
demonstrated this by killing tens of thousands of
Shi'ites who rose against the dictator after his Kn>
waiti misadventure.
Saddam's iraq had less in common with
Tunisia and Egypt than, ironically, with its
sworn enemy to the east: Iran. There, the peo¬
ple-powered Green Revolution of 2009, which fore¬
shadowed the Arab Spring, failed because Tehran
was able to deploy, to deadly effect, the Revolution¬
ary Guards and the Basij militia, two armed groups
that swear absolute loyalty to the regime. Their Iraqi
equivalents, the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen
Saddam, would have done the same for Saddam.
Ifthe Tunisian and Egyptian templates could not
have been applied to Iraq, might the Libyan and Syr¬
ian models have worked? That would have requited
an armed rebellion rising from a part ofthe country
where the dictator's grip was at its weakest and
where antiregime forces would have a safe havej>=-
like Benghazi in Libya. The most logical place for an
armed uprising against Saddam was Kurdistan, in
northern Iraq, which enjoyed a high degree of au¬
tonomy from Baghdad and the protection of U.S.
aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone.
But the Kurds are a separate ethnic group, long
resentful ofbeing ruled by Iraq's Arab majority. The
fierce Kurdish militia known as the peshmerga was
dedicated to protecting its own kind but had little
sympathy for Arab groups like the southern
Shi'ites that suffered under the dictator's rule.
That leaves only the Syrian example: a long,
bloody rebellion that devolves into a sectarian war.
Iraq already had its version in 1991, and the
regime won easily.
That's why Iraqis usually conclude that, absent
the U.S.-led invasion, Saddam Hussein would still be
ruling from Baghdad. Would Iraqis, with the benefit
of hindsight, have preferred that? My guess is that
they would not but we don't have a reliable poll.
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